ESC Capacitor
 

I'm new to RC and have a question regarding the capacitor on the ESC. I run a Tekin RSX in a 17.5 buggy. I was wondering if I could run the Honbywing cap instead of the stock Tekin cap. Reason being I cant position the cap properly. It's big and its "legs" don't give it much room to move. Also, I want to run the fan so positioning it on top of the ESC won't work.

The Tekin cap says 330uF. The Hobbywing cap says 470uF and there are 4 caps in series. Both say 16v. So, will this damage the ESC?

Thank you all in advance

Tekin have always been pretty adamant when I asked the same question that you should ONLY run the stock cap on their ESC's

Technically there really shouldn't be any reason why that wouldn't work or more specifically, not damage the ESC. I think Tekin's warnings about not using other sources for caps likely has more to do with them knowing how their own particular caps measure and that they meet a certain quality and performance guidelines. Using a larger than stock rated cap pack to lower ripple and increase storage voltage for peak amp draws is a somewhat common performance tweak, and theoretically, shouldn't do any harm if installed correctly.

If anyone knows any other reasons what they'd recommend against it I'd be most interested in hearing them.

If you are new I would advise you to use the search first before asking questions. About this subject there are many topics to find.

The main fault everyone makes is that they think capacitors are there to pick up high current peaks. In some way they are doing that but only on the high frequency's. The capacitor acts like a filter to filter out high frequencies on the power lines. The filter is calculated to the switching frequency of the ESC and with a different value the filter will filter its best on another frequency.

All the answers here are more or less correct. However that cap was tested to provide superior performance. The "other" brands cap boards often have "filters" or diodes where do not, hence our recommendation NOT to run them. Testing has already proven that one of our caps is often better performing than duals and even quads of other cap boards. In 17.5 however it won't be as large of an issue as the "ripple" current the cap is tasked with supporting is far less than say open mod.

There's nothing wrong with remote wiring the cap, as long as you understand you limit it's effectiveness the further you mount it from the ESC. I did a "how to" to show how to wire the RSX with various cap placements HERE.

I'm not convinced by this argument. It's a low pass filter, not a band pass filter. There's not much tuning involved, a larger capacitor will just filter out more frequencies which is a good thing.